Life and learning in an uncertain world | Helen Whitehead

Category Archives: MOOC

This November starts several new initiatives for me. Sustainability, Society and You The Sustainability, Society and You MOOC #freeonlinecourse on FutureLearn started yesterday. Six weeks of learning and sharing about sustainable lifestyles, individual, group, neighbourhood, national and global level. I’ve supported this MOOC, for lead educator Prof Sarah Speight, since

I took part in the Twitter chat today under the hashtag #foschat. My question was on how to deal with overwhelm. I consider myself pretty digitally literate. I have run a social media company: I have blogged and tweeted for a living. I have blogged since before the word became

In order to succeed, companies’ strategies for sustainability need to be informed by their context, aware of internal and external factors, and able to adapt with these in mind. A commonly used technique in developing strategy is SWOT analysis, based upon an assessment of ‘Strengths, ‘Weaknesses’, ‘Opportunities’ and ‘Threats’. These

Waste audits can be useful in helping you to consciously think about what you are producing/disposing and why? Do you know where your waste goes? Are you aware of the energy and water required to create the products you are using and then throwing away? In the Sustainability, Society and

This looks useful form Jisc: the Developing Digital Literacies infoKit which includes practical guidance, tools and approaches to digital literacies as well as top tips for different groups involved in digital literacy work and a set of illustrative case studies. Drawing on Jisc’s Developing Digital Literacies work, the Infokit

I really am not sure that it matters that a lot of the participants in MOOCs do not officially “complete”. Yet a lot of the furore around MOOCs centres on the fact that only a small proportion of the students actually complete the course. I’d like to argue that it isn’t necessary for students to complete the MOOC to get something out of it.

Legitimate peripheral participation (lurking!) is a phenomenon that has been studied in traditional online courses and communities and is particularly relevant in MOOCs. Someone like myself may well join a MOOC and take from it what I need and have time to get, and be perfectly satisfied with the learning I have achieved, yet perhaps not have completed very many assessment activities or indeed any at all.

Nottingham’s NOOC was an online course on Perspectives on Sustainability open to all staff and students at all three campuses of the University of Nottingham. Here’s the presentation from my talk about it at the Association for Learning Technology conference this week (sorry it’s a bit late!). Click into post for NOOCing Nottingham PDF